What I learn in life teaches me about who I am and who I want to be. This is what I've found out about me, so far...

January 6, 2010

Noodleeeee

Thanks to my parents and McGruff's help, I finally managed to make homemade noodles. I've been talking about it for years. For Christmas, I got a pasta attachment for my beloved KitchenAid stand mixer, thanks Mom & Dad.Last Saturday, MG and I set out with a mission. (This is post bread-making debacle, luckily MG was kind enough to look up the grams to cups conversions for me, so I could even use my new cookbook.)We started out with a pile of flour on the kitchen counter (sadly, we didn't think to photograph this part of the meal-making). Slowly working in eggs and water, with out hands, MG and I worked the dough into a nice round ball. We could have mixed the dough in the stand mixer, but working dough with your hands on the counter is so much more fun (and actually stress-relieving).Once the pasta was together it needed to rest for about 15 minutes. Being unsure how long it would take us to make the noodles, we started on the pasta sauce right away.MG and I prefer fire roasted tomatoes to jarred sauce. We started with some sauteed onions and green peppers. We then added in some garlic, the roasted tomatoes and some seasonings. (look, you can see my earlier adventure of Beer Bread on the counter!) Our sauce simmered away on the stove as we began balling up chunks of dough to send through the pasta machine.

Feeding the pasta machine and watching the long strands of noodles come out was easy. Separating the noodles so they could dry out a bit (and not be one giant noodle clump) was much more time consuming and difficult than we expected.We worked in batches, balling dough and sending it through the machine, then separating the noodles into great piles on the counter tops. The noodles cooked up quickly, once we had enough to put into the pot. Then it was time for dinner... Beer Bread, sauce and noodles - all homemade.The recipe made about a pound of noodles, but our growling tummies (plus the simmering sauce) declared we eat our dinner before noodling all the dough. The extra dough went into the refrigerator for the night. This was a happy accident, as we learned that cold dough made separating the noodles a lot easier. Also, the recipe says to pull the noodles from the extractor, which leaves one end very thin and prone to sticking to the other noodles. Using a butter knife to gently cut half the noodles off the extractor at a time worked so much better.